The Leonid meteor shower of 2001 was expected to contain up to 4000 meteors/hour! Of course, "up to" includes "rather a lot less than" but still it was impressive to see. According to http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/ observers in Arizona counted 2600/hour at the peak, but between the Silicon Valley haze and light I don't think I saw quite that many.

I went up Whiskey Hill Road southwest of Palo Alto to get away from the worst city lights and get above some of the lowland mist (my plan to go out to Byron, east of Mt. Diablo, was stymied by reports of thick mist and fog in the valley). Orange-red and greenish streaks were the most prevalent (see http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/Academy/Science/spectrum.html for one of the many and often contradictory meteor"color codes" found online); most streaks appeared briefly but some left afterglows ("trains") lingering for perhaps five seconds.

Photographing the little buggers was more difficult than anticipated as the blasted things refused to line up in orderly manner and parade through the segment of sky imaged by the camera (with the 35mm equivalent of a 38mm lens) when I had the shutter open. Twice, sets of four meteors passed overhead, almost in formation, within the space of two seconds - while the camera was pointed elsewhere.

Furthermore, even visually bright streaks often failed to make much of an impression photographically, as the streaks were transient and fleeting, unlike the stars which glared their steely stare into the lens for a full 30 seconds.

Our window in the USA was on 18 November 2001; these pix are from the wee hours of that morning.

	3:11am (1111 UTC) Just south of Procyon. Thin, high clouds off the Pacific reflect reddish light from San Francisco and Silicon Valley
	Detail of above at 100% (one onscreen pixel per camera pixel) NASA boffins attribute the green color to the presence of Magnesium.
	3:22am (1122 UTC) facing roughly south. Orion can be seen running off the right side of the picture.
	Detail of above image at about 300% magnification (bicubic upsampling) The violet color is said to be due to Calcium, unless it's just on-chip reflection and flare in the camera!
	1:37am (0937 UTC) facing northeast across the glow of the San Francisco peninsula. Totally amazing trail! Unfortunately it's just a large jet on left base for RWY 28L at SFO (yes, at one bloody forty in the ayem...)

Tech details: Sony DSC-F707 camera, ISO 400, "indoor" white balance (~2700K), full wide at 9.7mm, 30 seconds at F2, sharpness at -2. Following exposure the camera captures a 30 second image of the shuttered CCD and uses it to find and eliminate "hot" pixels. First four images gamma-boosted (to 1.20) in Photoshop to bring up sky detail when viewed on my (perhaps unnaturally dark) Viewsonic LCD display, to better match the way they look on the rev.B Apple LCD Studio Displays,  but otherwise unmodified.